The 'Other' Working Class: An Ethnography of a Racialised Surplus Population among Roma in the Czech Republic

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My research has the potential to transform the theory and policy understanding of the reality of Roma workers in post-socialist Europe. In particular, it aims to shift the paradigm away from the category of unemployment of racialised Roma workers towards underemployment. I have demonstrated the originality and significance of my research by publishing three peer-review academic journal articles during my PhD: in Race & Class ("Stigma and segregation: containing the Roma of Údol", 2020; "'Roma: The Invisible Workforce of Ostrava", 2017) and in the Journal of Law and Political Economy ("Roma Workers under Czech Racial Capitalism", 2021). The Fellowship would enable me to extend and develop my publication profile with a sole-authored academic monograph and two or more public-facing thought pieces.The proposed monograph, building on my PhD dissertation, will contribute to the leading-edge of academic theory on surplus population, racialisation, and employment. It will bring this to the post-socialist context, through an ethnographic study of the lived experiences and perspective of racialised Roma workers, a category that has been so far under-studied and under-theorised in East-Central Europe and beyond. Responding to developments in the theory of "relative surplus population" in the 21st century, in particular by Benanav (2020), Endnotes (2010, 2015) and Farris (2019), I will disrupt conventional understandings of categories of "employment" and "unemployment", and illustrate the particular way in which racial stereotypes and racialising social and economic policies confine Roma workers to low paid, precarious jobs, stigmatised neighbourhoods, and dependence on debt. My work also adds a critical layer of analysis to studies of post-socialism that are mostly focused on white working-class nationalism and workers' susceptibility to racism (Kalb, 2021; Szombati, 2018). The originality of my intervention is also in its form: I bring an ethnographic method and findings to an otherwise largely theoretical debate on surplus population. I use these empirical data analytically to demonstrate how partial deindustrialisation, post-socialist weakening of labour protections, and capital's fluctuating demand for labour have turned Roma workers into a racialised surplus population, a structural condition integral to their governance. Importantly, I also provide rare insights into the under-researched and hard to access sphere of household debt, and use these insights to build theory. The primary output from the Fellowship will be a monograph, Roma: The Invisible Workers of Post-socialism, with a leading university press. My target press is Duke University Press (Theory in Forms series), which has a record of publishing ethnographies of post-socialism. To disseminate my findings to a wider audience (including policy makers and practitioners in the field of human rights and racial justice), and to promote the monograph, the Fellowship will involve two additional activities: two thought pieces co-authored with my mentor, Sara Farris, which will target the London Review of Books (Short Cuts), NLR's Sidecar, The Conversation, and Eurozine; and a film project entitled Roma: The Invisible Working Class in collaboration with a video artist, Tomás Rafa, and my mentor, Ben Rogaly. The film will tell the story of the everyday reality of underemployed Roma workers. It will involve limited further research in Ostrava, use the existing material that I gathered during the fieldwork, and archive footage of Tomás Rafa who, using the methods of cinéma vérité, has been documenting anti-Roma racism in the Central European region since 2009. The purpose of the film project will be to communicate the main findings of my PhD in an accessible format, which could be used academically and in Roma rights advocacy (see Beneficiaries below).